Microsoft drops caps on its liability for products

Microsoft is ready to take the heat if its products land customers in trouble.

The software maker will pay its customers' full legal bills if they get sued over intellectual property issues relating to its products. Also, Microsoft no longer limits its liability when a customer suffers damages due to gross negligence or intentional misconduct on Microsoft's part, associate general counsel at Microsoft, Morris Kremen, said.

The improved legal protection on Microsoft products were part of changes the company made earlier this year in its volume licensing program, Kremen said.

In older contracts, Microsoft only agreed to pay legal fees and be accountable for charges of gross negligence or intentional misconduct up to the value of the software a customer bought.

Software buyers did not care for that and often protested those provisions in contract negotiations, he said.

"Customers were not happy with that as a fair allocation of risk and they thought it was too protective of Microsoft," Kremen said.

The changes to the licensing policies went into effect first in the US in March and were introduced in the rest of the world in the following months.

"It is about risk and giving the customer the peace of mind they were asking for," Kremen said.

Customers in the US, widely seen as a litigious society, were worried most about the limited liability.

"We certainly heard the concern most frequently from US customers, but I also heard this from customers in Germany and in France," Kremen said.

Although the changes expand Microsoft's legal exposure, Kremen does not expect the company to actually have to start writing checks.

He could not recall a single instance in which a customer had to call any of the now updated contractual provisions into play.

Microsoft reworked its volume licenses and got rid of the sticking points as part of a broader company effort to be nice to its customers and better its image, Kremen said.

"There is not a person here that has not heard the message that we have to get a lot better at listening to customers and show them that we are listening," he said.

The updated license policies also give Microsoft some ammunition in its battle against open source.

In May, The SCO Group warned commercial Linux users they may be liable for intellectual property violations because, it alleges, the Linux source code contains illegal inclusions of SCO Unix intellectual property.

SCO's move followed a lawsuit it filed on March 7 against IBM, charging IBM used proprietary Unix code for the open-source Linux operating system, violating the Unix license agreement it has with SCO.

Some big Linux vendors do not offer indemnification the way Microsoft now does.

"This new indemnification plan Microsoft came out with is a model for the industry and certainly raises the bar," she said. "I don't think it is sufficient or responsible for a company as large as IBM to just tell their customer that this lawsuit is going nowhere.

"The big issue about this SCO lawsuit is the indemnification of customers. Whether or not SCO fades into the woodwork, the indemnification issue is not germane just to SCO.

"Indemnification is a huge issue. Microsoft is trying to win back customer confidence and what they have now is a model for the rest of the software industry."

PCW Evaluation Team

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